SGI: Computer Graphics

ive installed the demo of lightwave 5.6 on my Octane, and it works, except that clicking of load or save will not bring up a fiel browser or anything to load or save!!!

what were the limitations of the demo??? surly you were able to open stuff!!! there are a whole bunch of example files with it!!!

im currently running 6.5.26f...

I remember reading about that...somewhere, not sure where exactly it was. Have you tried searching Usenet archives, it is possible that it was some newsgroup post there that talked about the problem you are experiencing?

Search for "Lightwave Patch" on comp.sys.sgi.

Nuff said.

will not work with the demo version, sorry.

try to find an original one, like i did

Like on *cough* emule *cough*

No, like on ebay.

I wrote: original one.

Can post an photo later

Just nudging the OP in the right direction

After all, owning the media doesn't give you a right to use... but that's a whole other topic. I think it's fairly clear that Lightwave isn't interested in supporting IRIX anymore. Go figure

While this may be true with other software vendors, Newtek has been pretty good at allowing licenses to be transferred to new owners. As a matter of fact, although there isn't any new version of Lightwave 3D out for Irix any more, I think one can use the Irix license to "upgrade" to Lightwave 3D for other platforms (Mac/PC).

No, I don't own Lightwave 3D on Irix, but I have a licensed copy on my PC.

Ok, i bought Lightwave on eBay from the old, original owner and Newtek transfered the license to me as the new owner (right english?)

Newtek's pretty good that way. I had both PC/Mac versions and had lost (had stolen) the PC dongle and software along 2 moves across country. I called up Newtek, they asked did I even want the Mac version and basically I traded my Mac dongle for the PC dongle.

And finally after much searching found the manuals I had been looking for for 2 years.

Now to get Maya hooked up on IRIX as easily... Yeah, right.

ISTR that Lightwave uses a completely arse-backwards way to get standard open and save dialogs - it calls a seperate file selector binary which writes the selected file path to somewhere in /tmp. Maybe it's not finding this seperate binary? Is your path all okay? I think it was called filesel or something. Bloody stupid way to carry on IMO.

When you install Lightwave (demo or original version) with the Software Manager, you get dialog window with some specific instructions.

These are (in a nutshell):

1. Install Lightwave using the software manager (duh).
2. In a shell, type "SETUPLW", which will run /usr/sbin/SETUPLW. This procedure adds the path /usr/lightwave/Bin.
3. Log out and then log back in, with the same user.
4. In a shell, type "which LW" to see if the correct path is added.

This should make it possible to load the included project files (even with the demo version). Saving is NOT possible with the demo.

Hmm - as mentioned in the last post here it looks as if something changed after 6.5.22 which broke NewTek's (horrible) load/save mechanism.

strace of the LW binary shows it doing:



I also notice that there's a few calls labelled as being to SYS_191 which results in an ENOSYS and several to SYS_78, SYS_202, SYS_203, SYS_207, SYS_208, which I guess are just fucntions that strace doesn't know about (or are deprecated?)

stracing the fsel binary with the same parameters resutls in setting up of SHM, reading from a socket, and SegFaulting.

I've uploaded this for viewing here

Could someone who's not yet upgraded beyond 6.5.22 please try tracing the fsel process (or, at least, taking a copy of /tmp/fsel.result), to see what it outputs. If someone could also trace the Save dialog too then hopefully, it will then be possible to replace the fsel binary with another that actually works.

The commands seem to be:



Note that the final one ("Save As") isn't invoked via "sh -c", unlike other other two.

IIRC, it happened between 6.5.9m (which worked) and 6.5.15m (where it no longer did).

Been thinking about downgrading the teal Indigo 2 to 6.5.9. just for access to older files but... I haven't used LW in years. Not sure it would be even worth the effort.

But if I can, I'll try to do as you suggest.

Be careful when downgrading IRIX. Older pre 6.5.16 versions have no knowledge of XFS version 2 filesystems and try to treat them as version 1 which fails. There is no tool for converting version 2 to version 1 XFS. Been there, done that.
Best thing to do is to reinstall 6.5.9 on a separate disk and try to copy the relevant files to a NFS mount or transfer them to CD...

I have a maxed out octane2 (2x v12 DCD) that I am going to connect four monitors to.

Irix load is fresh ... nothing there yet.

What are some tools and/or software packages I could put on this to have some really visually appealing and impressive graphics demonstrations ?

Preferably something that can be scaled up to all four screens, etc.

VR simulations / demos ?

oil and gas visualization tools ?

What's floating around out there ?

One place to start would be the demos that come with IRIX: http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?coll=0650&db=relnotes&fname=/usr/relnotes/demos

Otherwise, if you're a Maya nut (like me), and you own any of the innumerable Maya instruction books (like me), that come with CD's, the movies on those CD's are another good place to start...

Jealous

I would just plug those four cables into my monitor and fire up mplayer. Watching a movie fullsecreen ought to give the ol' graphics system a nice workout. Does the genlock on v12's work in an Octane ? Would be interesting to see if that solves the screen tearing problem.

The underlying issue may be how you intend to span the display across all four screens. The traditional shipped-with-IRIX method would be to span each pair of DCD-driven displays with one of the 2@ display formats provided by xsetmon (e.g. 2@1280x1024_60), then use the SGI port of Xinerama to tie the two pairs of displays into a single four panel logical display. The downside to using Xinerama is usually only the primary display (or in the case of your DCD equiped V12s, the primary pair of displays) will be able to display OpenGL rendered content - so OpenGL will only work on two of the four displays.

SGI's solution for transparently spanning OpenGL across a multi-panel logical display is/was OpenGL MultiPipe . At one time OpenGL MultiPipe was freely available on SGI's 'Download Cool Software' page. I haven't looked lately, but hopefully it's still (freely) available through Supportfolio .

I just did 20-30 mins of searching around and did not find OpenGL Multipipe (or any software like that that could be downloaded from *.sgi.com...

Found plenty of documentation, but not the software.